Slurs and Thick Terms

Slurs and Thick Terms
Author: Bianca Cepollaro
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2020-08-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1793610533

What is the relation between language, communication, and values? In Slurs and Thick Terms: When Language Encodes Values, Bianca Cepollaro explores the ways in which certain pieces of evaluative language not only reflect speakers’ moral perspectives, but also contribute to promoting their evaluative stance. She focuses on slurs—the prototypical example of hate speech, including racial and homophobic epithets—and so-called thick terms, that is, those expressions, much discussed in metaethics, that mix description and evaluation such as "lewd," "chaste," "generous," or "selfish." This book argues that in employing such terms, speakers not only say something purely factual about people and things, but also presuppose certain values, as if they were common ground among the conversation participants. Cepollaro illustrates how this linguistic mechanism effectively explains the pervasive social and moral effects of evaluative language. Using a multidisciplinary approach, she tackles issues in philosophy of language, linguistics, ethics, and metaethics. Moreover, the theoretical investigation takes into consideration and discusses empirical data from psychology and experimental philosophy.

Thick Concepts

Thick Concepts
Author: Simon Kirchin
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2013-04-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191652504

What is the difference between judging someone to be good and judging them to be kind? Both judgements are typically positive, but the latter seems to offer more description of the person: we get a more specific sense of what they are like. Very general evaluative concepts (such as good, bad, right and wrong) are referred to as thin concepts, whilst more specific ones (including brave, rude, gracious, wicked, sympathetic, and mean) are termed thick concepts. In this volume, an international team of experts addresses the questions that this distinction opens up. How do the descriptive and evaluative functions or elements of thick concepts combine with each other? Are these functions or elements separable in the first place? Is there a sharp division between thin and thick concepts? Can we mark interesting further distinctions between how thick ethical concepts work and how other thick concepts work, such as those found in aesthetics and epistemology? How, if at all, are thick concepts related to reasons and action? These questions, and others, touch on some of the deepest philosophical issues about the evaluative and normative. They force us to think hard about the place of the evaluative in a (seemingly) nonevaluative world, and raise fascinating issues about how language works.

Thick Evaluation

Thick Evaluation
Author: Simon Kirchin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2017
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198803435

The descriptions 'good' and 'bad' are examples of thin concepts, as opposed to 'kind' or 'cruel' which are thick concepts. Simon Kirchin provides one of the first full-length studies of the crucial distinction between 'thin' and 'thick' concepts, which is fundamental to many debates in ethics, aesthetics and epistemology

Slurs and Expressivity

Slurs and Expressivity
Author: Eleonora Orlando
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2021-04-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1793614377

Slurs and Expressivity: Semantics and Beyond, edited by Eleonora Orlando and Andres Saab,focuses on the analysis of the expressive aspects of slur-words, namely, those words prima facie related to the conveyance of contemptuous or derogatory feelings for the members of a certain group of people identified in terms of their ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, political ideology, and other personal qualities. In as far as they are used to express emotional attitudes, slurs are, thus, a kind of expressive words. This collection provides different hypotheses regarding the way in which the expressive import of slurs and other related expressive words is semantically encoded in the grammar and how their meaning impacts other aspects related to their use in different practices of linguistic communication. These linguistic practices are usually, but not always, related to segregation and discrimination of particular human groups. Therefore, any contribution to the theory of slur meaning is, directly or indirectly, also a contribution to a better understanding of those practices and to finding the best way to eradicate them.

Theory of Value Structure

Theory of Value Structure
Author: Erich H. Rast
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2022-03-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1793616957

The theory of value structure concerns the meaning of “better than” and “good,” as well as the way in which values serve as a basis for rational decision making. Drawing methodologically from economics and theories of decision making, the aim of serious axiology in metaethics is to do justice to problems that have puzzled philosophers of value for centuries. Can value comparisons be cyclic? Are all values comparable with each other and can decision makers just add up different aspects of an evaluation to determine the best course of action? A Theory of Value Structure: From Values to Decisions starts with a thorough introduction to the modeling of “better than” comparisons from a normative perspective. In the philosophical part of the book, Erich H. Rast argues that aspects of “better than” comparisons can differ qualitatively so much that one aspect may outrank another. Consequently, the classical weighted sum aggregation model fails. Values cannot always be summed up and comparisons may be fundamentally noncompensatory, an indeterminacy that explains problems like the apparent nontransitivity of “better than” and hard cases in decision making. Using a lexicographic method of value comparisons, Rast develops a multidimensional theory of “better than” and shows how and to which extent it can be combined with standard methods of decision making under uncertainty by using rank-dependent utility theory.

Nigger

Nigger
Author: Randall Kennedy
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2008-12-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307538915

Randall Kennedy takes on not just a word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture with bracing courage and intelligence—with a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial. It’s “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many Black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word, of course, is nigger, and in this candid, lucidly argued book the distinguished legal scholar Randall Kennedy traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and explores the controversies that rage around it. Should Blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should the law treat it as a provocation that reduces the culpability of those who respond to it violently? Should it cost a person his job, or a book like Huckleberry Finn its place on library shelves?

Invisible Language

Invisible Language
Author: Garth L. Hallett
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2014-03-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0739182870

Invisible Language: Its Incalcuable Significance for Philosophy reveals that although the use of language is visible or audible, the medium employed boasts neither of these attributes. Garth L. Hallet suggests that from Plato until now, the intangibility of language has exercised a far more profound influence in philosophy than even Wittgenstein came close to demonstrating. Indeed, without that pervasive factor of language, the history of philosophy would have been undeniably different. Yet philosophy is, and can legitimately aspire to be, much more than a struggle between language and human comprehension of it. Ultimately, this book suggests that philosophy’s positive possibilities, so often obscured by linguistically-inattentive practice, reach as far as human thought can reach.

Just Words

Just Words
Author: Mary Kate McGowan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2019-01-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0192565222

We all know that speech can be harmful. But what are the harms and how exactly does the speech in question brings those harms about? Mary Kate McGowan identifies a previously overlooked mechanism by which speech constitutes, rather than merely causes, harm. She argues that speech constitutes harm when it enacts a norm that prescribes that harm. McGowan illustrates this theory by considering many categories of speech including sexist remarks, racist hate speech, pornography, verbal triggers for stereotype threat, micro-aggressions, political dog whistles, slam poetry, and even the hanging of posters. Just Words explores a variety of harms - such as oppression, subordination, discrimination, domination, harassment, and marginalization - and ways in which these harms can be remedied.

Speaking of Silence in Heidegger

Speaking of Silence in Heidegger
Author: Wanda Torres Gregory
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2021-10-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1793640041

In Speaking of Silence in Heidegger, Wanda Torres Gregory critically analyzes Heidegger’sthoughts on silence. Arguing that silence about silence is a guiding principle in his sparse and often reticent words, Torres Gregory sets out to decipher their elusive meanings. Charting the trajectory of Heidegger’s reflections, from Being and Time to On the Way to Language, she shows that he develops his ideas of silence in increasingly closer relations to his also evolving ideas of truth as the unconcealedness of being/beyng and language as disclosive sonorous saying. Torres Gregory distinguishes between human, primordial, and primeval forms of silence, and the linguistic, pre-linguistic, and proto-linguistic levels at which silence can occur in relation to sonorous speech. While the book focuses on these inner conceptual dynamics, the author remains mindful of Heidegger’s ties to National Socialism and clarifies how his theoretical assumptions allow for oppressive silencing. The book concludes with critical reflections on the later Heidegger’s thinking of silence and proposes alternatives to his claims concerning the sound beyond sounds, the metaphysics of mystical silence, the uniquely linguistic essence of the mortals, and the loud idle talk in the age of modern technology.

Metaphor and Metaphilosophy

Metaphor and Metaphilosophy
Author: Sarah A. Mattice
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2014-10-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0739192213

Sarah A. Mattice explores contemporary philosophical activity and the way in which one aspect of language—metaphor—gives shape and boundary to the landscape of the discipline. The book examines metaphors of combat, play, and aesthetic experience and emphasizes how the choices we make in philosophical language are deeply intertwined with what we think philosophy is and how it should be practiced. Drawing on a broad range of resources, from cognitive linguistics and hermeneutics to aesthetics and Chinese philosophy, Mattice's argument provides insight into the evolution and future of philosophy itself.